Privacy Files: The Secret to Happiness

We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.

And the methodology by which Facebook and Cornell studied “emotional contagion”?

In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people.

Emotions can be conveyed by words? In print? What an exciting discovery!

One methodological note left out of the summary: the study was conducted in secret. The users had not been informed that Facebook was rearranging the news feeds they received.

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It is my understanding that one important component of rigor in any test that purports to be scientific is that the subjects do not know they are being tested.

Even when people volunteer for tests, there is usually a control group who are given a placebo in order to reduce the distortion that is introduced into peoples’ behavior when they know they are being watched or tested.

If you do not want to be in the public domain, then do not participate in public websites, at least with your real identity. That is hardly a radical new discovery and I didn’t need to involve 689,000 others to figure that out.

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